Unhelpful Help

So, I just had a baby seven weeks ago. My parents came up, ostensibly to 'help', but really to see the baby; and my in-laws arrived for a six week visit, to really help and also see our kids.

Now, don't misunderstand me, I love my parents, and I love my in-laws. They are all wonderful in their own ways, and I love having them around. However, I do wish that sometimes they would listen when I say not to do something. There is a reason we have a saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." A few examples:

My parents decided, while I was in the hospital having my son, that they would help us out by cleaning the bottoms of our copper pans. What a nice thing to do, right? I mean, they were discolored from use (normal oxidation of the copper), and had some black stuff on them in places, so it was a nice gesture on their part. However, did my parents stop and ask themselves, "What is the best way to clean these? Perhaps we should ask (Dear Daughter) or (Dear Son-in-Law)?" No. They went out and bought a scouring pad, admittedly for copper, but still, a scouring pad, and scoured the bottoms of our pans to get rid of the discoloration and few spots of baked on crud. The problem? The pans each had a special brushed finish, which required using a special cleanser and absolutely forbids the use of scouring pads! So, I got home, and found that one of my pans had literally been scrubbed to where the copper is almost gone in spots, and both pans had the brushed finish absolutely RUINED. Now, we don't have our pans on display, and we can still cook with them, so they are functional. However, it did really piss me off for about 24 hours that they did this and didn't stop to ask if it was okay to do so. They just went ahead and did it anyway, as if it was their property in question. I had similar red spot, rage inducing moments with them over Christmas, including the unasked for sharpening of knives and OCD-induced cleaning of car battery posts after a dead battery incident (caused, I might add, by my DAD leaving a door open on our car).

I used to think these rage inducing moments were limited to my own parents, but I have realized that it really comes from having someone, anyone, in your house for a period of time for the express purpose of "helping" you. The reason for this is, anyone in your house is going to do things their way, and not your way. And, this is very annoying. Just what exactly it will be that annoys you is up for grabs at each visit, but there will always be something that your house guests do that will annoy the crap out of you. The last time my in-laws visited for 6 weeks, I got mad at my FIL for reading the newspaper before me. Ridiculous? Yes!! But I had my routine, I was 6 weeks' pregnant with my first child (unbeknownst to my ILs), and damn it, I wanted it to be MY WAY when I got home from work!

This time, I find myself raging at my MIL a scant three days after her departure, simply because the poor woman tried to help me out by folding our laundry and tidying up our house. So tonight I utterly lost it, because when I went to do my usual mound of dirty laundry, I encountered another mound of folded, clean laundry on my dryer, obscuring the dryer controls and making it impossible for me to get back to my laundry routine. Big deal, you say, just move them. Ah, but see, there is the rub. Our clothes are a mass of disorderly conduct waiting to be arrested. In fact, it has gotten so bad that DH & I, who are perpetually avoiding anything to do with organization, actually purchased an expensive closet organizer system during the ILs visit, and actually were going to install it this past weekend (unfortunately DH injured his back, but that is a tale for another day). In any case, we had no place to actually put the clean clothes, and this had been the case for about 2 weeks as we had started sorting and clearing out our closet. Compound this with the fact that we had no access to our son's chest of drawers for a lengthy period of baby clothes organization (the baby room doubles as the guest room, and the ILs were occupying the closet pretty well in there), and we had a bunch of new baby clothes thrown in.

So, my MIL, being the ever tidy woman she is, had been folding our clothes and putting them around our room, "until you get a chance to put them away, ok?" Ignoring the fact that we had NO PLACE to put them, piles of clean, folded clothes appeared on the floor along the wall, in the baby's crib, and, the place of last resort, the top of the dryer. If I were an insecure person, I would think she was trying to tell me something, but I know that she doesn't give a crap about where we put our clothes or anything else, she just wanted them out of her sight because it literally bothers her to see stuff hanging about. Ditto our piles of paper everywhere--she absolutely had to clear it out of sight before any visitors arrived, because she personally just could not live with it being out when "company" came around.

Now, this is being helpful, in my MIL's mind. To me, it's being so unhelpful it had me cursing her as I shoved neatly folded clothes haphazardly into a laundry basket already containing another load of clean clothes. Why? Because I have my own system for laundry, TYVM. So what if the clothes don't always make it into the closet or chest of drawers before they are worn? At least I always know what is clean and what is dirty, and where the clothes are that my kids have outgrown that need to be packed away. Now, I am in a chaos of clothes, and I don't know what is clean, what's dirty, what is stained and needs pre-treatment, what clothes my son has outgrown...it's a complete disaster! And I have a room full of gift bags from a baby shower, all containing clothes that need to be sorted into returns (too small and have a gift receipt), future baby shower gifts (too small and no receipt or identifiable brand for easy return), to be worn now, and to be worn in the future. AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH! My house has been taken over by clothing!

*sigh* I won't even discuss the chaos of bills & paper blowing all around my house. My MIL had spots for hiding things, and the number of times I have had to go hunting through them for something is mind boggling. Yes, I pile; but I also know exactly where things are. That has been completely disrupted, and I'm in a sea of paystubs, bills, and miscellaneous correspondence. It's a complete, utter, nightmare, and God only knows when I will get it organized. I'm lucky if I have time for a shower or on the computer these days, so when I will get all of that back together is beyond me.

The bottom line is, folks, that the next time I have a baby, I'm going to tell every well-intentioned relative to stay home. I'd rather deal with a dirty house and order lots of take-out pizza and Quiznos rather than deal with this complete, utter disaster. Yes, I am on my last nerve...now take your plane tickets and go home. We love you, thanks for coming.